Nostos (2016 - Ongoing)
I was born in Germany by Greek parents, who were themselves children of Greek migrants in the 50s and were called Gastarbeiter. We lived in a Greek community in the suburbs of Munich. We spoke only Greek, I went to Greek schools, I had only Greek friends, we listened to Greek music, watched Greek TV and radio, and I grew up with the stories from my grandparents about their homeland in Greece.
Although I was growing up in Germany, these stories from Greece shaped my inner map and gave me the landscapes I carry inside me. The paradox is that I carried landscapes from the stories I heard, not from what I saw every day. The landscapes of Germany never found a place in my memory, because my imagination was already full of the strong stories I heard about the much needed homeland of my grandparents.
As a teenager I returned to northern Greece for high school and lived there for more than fifteen years. In 2016, like many young Greeks during the financial crisis, I moved abroad again and found a new home in Berlin, which gives me stability, education and a place in a lively city. Greece however remains the place where I feel most deeply connected, even though everyday life there is difficult. Anaksiocracy, corruption, unemployment and lack of future make it hard to stay there. But still I love the people and the villages, and they remain my home. I need to return like breathing, but breathing there is not truly possible.
This is the contradiction behind Nostos. In ancient Greek, nostos means homecoming. But it also carries the sense of a return that is never complete. The houses I photograph are both full and empty, present and absent. My images explore this feeling, shared by many in the Greek diaspora: belonging that endures across distance, and return that never feels complete.
Writers like Simon Schama remind us that landscapes are not just nature, they are shaped by stories and memory. Pierre Nora calls certain places sites of memory, where history and identity stay alive even as daily life fades. The villages and the people I photograph are such sites. They are more than ruins, they are living reminders of family, history and attachment.
For me photography is a way to carry this paradox. Returning with a camera allows me to stay close to a homeland I cannot fully inhabit, and to share that feeling with others who live the same tension between love and distance.
